[SEQ. XIV] 1Now I’m making waffles. 2I am thirty years old and I have short hair and a good smile. My muscles feel good and my confidence is strong. 3The kitchen is wide open and there are pots and pans hanging from little hooks. It looks nice. 4My wife is a thin brunette who usually wears white shirts and black yoga pants. She doesn’t teach yoga but she’s thought about it. 5She’s a vegetarian who thinks vegans are pious. I don’t really like her. But I love my daughter. 6And right now my daughter is sitting at the kitchen table and she’s dressed up like a princess for no special occasion. She wears a pink dress with a crown on her head and a scepter in her hand. And now that I’m actually looking at the costume and giving it more than just a passing glance, I think she might be dressed as a kind of fairy princess instead and not just a regular, run of the mill, earth bound human princess. Boring. 7I lift up the waffle iron and see that the waffle is burnt to an absolute black crisp. “Okay, baby! Guess what we’ve got here?” “Smells like it’s burning. Did you burn my waffles again?” 8“I sure did. I know just how you like em! Black with a little bit of whipped cream.” 9“Ebony and irony,” she sing-songs jokingly. 10I love her and I’m thinking about packing her up one night and leaving her mom. 11It might work but the horuscribe tells me it’s a mistake. 12The horuscribe is a small creature, three feet tall, that lingers in the ceiling corner of all rooms that I enter. 13Its body is very narrow and has always reminded me of a carrot – thick at top and tapered out at the bottom. 14It wears a black robe and a white mask. The white mask looks like a deer skull with black make-up applied to it. 15The black make-up highlights certain areas like spots on a dog. 16Sometimes, however, I wonder if the deer mask is not a mask at all but rather just its face. 17The horuscribe has eyeballs – two in the front of its face in the same place that I do. 18It has long black and white fingers that also look like bone. 19It watches me. It simply watches me. 20On the morning of my 26th birthday, it was the first daybreak of the second Knuckled Moon, I woke up and my wife told me, “Happy Birthday. I’m pregnant.” And it was that same morning that I first saw the horuscribe. 21My wife has never seen it. Nobody has ever seen it. 22When I use the bathroom, it is there. 23When I am intimate with my wife, it is there. 24In my car, it is there. It is everywhere. 25It was there when I opened my eyes. And now its there whether my eyes are open or not and I can’t get rid of it. 26Everywhere I go, there it is. 27I’ve tried to touch it but nothing happens. My hand passes through it but there is a sense of captivity when I do. 28It watches me and sometimes it points at me but I don’t know what it means. 29It is always in the room that I’m in and it is always there when I leave and it is always in the next room before I enter. 30It is never positioned in such a way wherein I can see if it exists in two places at once. 31One time I was watching a late night science documentary and it was talking about how, in quantum physics, a singular atom can exist in two places at once and move in two different directions at the same time. 32There’s nothing I can do with this information because I am not a quantum physicist but I found it interesting albeit useless. 33At first I had a very difficult time coming to terms with its presence but now I find it kind of comforting. 34I’ve gotten used to it. 35And then one day I walked into my house after a long day of work and I found that the creature was sitting atop my daughters head, propped on top of her scalp like a vulture. 36It seemed to be in a state of subdued ecstasy – a kind of waking coma. 37“Meghan?” I asked and her hand lifts in the air and she smiles. “Hey, dad! How was your day at work?” 38She is full of joy and she seems like herself but it is not her. 39This creature is puppeteering her being. 40The creature was controlling her like a puppet, drawing her arms and legs like marionette strings, creating mock emotions that felt genuine but were imposters. 41Has it not been observing me? Has it been observing her? What has it stolen from me? 42All things my daughter does, no matter how genuine they seem, are now only reflections of real emotions. 43When I tell her I love her, she responds and the worst part is that she thinks she means it but she doesn’t. 44When she goes to school, she studies hard for good grades and she really does try but really it is the horuscribe trying and succeeding and I want to be proud of her because she doesn’t understand the difference but I do. I understand. I see through her. 45Perhaps this horuscribe is her true self? 46Is my daughter a projection of this oddity? 47Is the horuscribe a projection of a projection? 48Do I have a horuscribe attached to me that I cannot see? 49Do I think I am making my own decisions while only being a puppet myself? 50Has my daughter been living with her own visions of a creature attached to me, understanding that I am not her father at all? 51If my daughter feels emotions and thinks they’re real, even if they are being manufactured by the sentient thoughts of another, does that negate them? 52When does self-awareness stop or start being self-awareness? 53My world is false. My world is a projection. My world is transparent. 54My daughter is here but she is not real. 55My daughter is this creature. This creature is my daughter. 56My daughter is just a body. Just a sock filled with meat that is being propelled through an entity no one can see except myself. 57My wife speaks to me. I listen. My wife speaks to Meghan. She listens. 58She answers. She smiles. She waves. She jokes. She eats. She poops. She vomits. 59She is my Meghan. 60And then one day the creature speaks to me. Speaks to me for the very first time. And it says to me, in a voice that sounds like a phone sex operator at a PTA meeting, ‘The Sky is Falling.” 61And I feel the sentence with each of its capital letters. 62I feel the hard importance and the factuality of this statement. 63I look up and the sky cracks open and begins to crumble like rocks. 64Large boulders of celestial matter crumble and fall to the earth in slow motion. 65Their ragged edges rip holes in the fabric of existence. Sheets peel down from the sky, of the sky, like billboards in a hurricane. Earth. The Greatest advertisement. 66We are knocked out of orbit and our planet tears through the cosmos. 67I lift off the ground and my back slams into an apple tree in our front yard. 68I feel my spine snap and my legs disappear but it’s okay because I can fly. 69The soil and the sky switch spots and the earth tears apart like a loaf of bread. 70 “You can save her,” the creature whispers to me. “You can save your daughter from this fate but you have to do it now.” 71“Do what? Save her from what? What is happening?” 72I desperately want to save my daughter and I desperately want to make a decision but I don’t know the rules. I don’t know the logic. I don’t have the information readily available to make a smart move. 73Can I even trust this thing? 74 “You must choose now, Richard.” “What is happening?” “Everything is falling apart. The pants of existence are getting unzipped. You knew it would be your generation. You always knew. And now here it is and you weren’t ready. There goes your house.” 75I turn my head and I see my house tip over like a two dimensional slice of cheese and then it vanishes. 76The world suddenly looks flat and strange although I think it has always looked like this? Do I have new eyes? A new brain? Where am I?[SEQ. XV] 1I look down and see that I have neither body nor eyes. I am not breathing. 2I am embedded into the actual fabric of time. 3I am a moment. 4My eyes perceive all at once. 5Asia is my hand and Europe is my fist and North America is my toe. 6I feel the people walking on me and planting in me and digging in me. 7The pressure of the cities are great, like tumors. The gray masses grow and grow until it destroys my life cells. 8And then the people crumble. 9They always crumble. They always come and go. They rise and they fall. 10They destroy one another. 11This time it will be with cellular weapons. 12The land will become polluted by their toxicity and then I will heal. 13I always heal. 14Until my mother Sun eats me alive, I will grow, the chosen princess of Miss Universe. 15The Greator chose me to bear life and to hold the secrets. 16I reach deep into my core and I find fire and I squeeze it tight inside me and I feel it drizzle out of my holes like burning shit. 17People scream for their lives from my red-hot diarrhea and I destroy their villages and burn their cultures in my frantic filth. 18Ash cakes the sky and thousands choke to death. 19They should have known better. 20They should have asked me not to do it. 21The cities will be next. If only I could reach them somehow. 22They are destroying me and eating away at my simple perfections and flawless ecosystems. 23They are recreating a photoshopped copy of life and it disgusts me. 24Bow to me, you fucking Humanlings! You stand atop me! You eat my grain! You eat my vegetables! You eat my fruit! I give you water. I give you trees and oxygen! I bore you. I gave you life. I nurtured you in my womb that you call the atmosphere. You are my children. Bow to me and respect me. Worship me. Tell me that you love me. Show me your appreciation. Tell me that I am beautiful. Fall to my feet, you pitiful worms or eat from the dumpster of my asshole.24I flex my unbreakable abs and a tsunami rushes over the coastal communities and I laugh as they drown and I watch their miserable little bodies float through the streets. 25Let the buildings save you now. Let your silly paper money bandage your wounds.

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